Vietnam's youngest captain writes heartfelt letter that takes the internet by storm

In response to complaints and laments from friends and relatives about flight delays on Vietnamese airlines, 9x captain Nguyen Quang Dat of Jetstar Pacific Airlines decided to write a “letter from the heart” on his personal Facebook page. Through this, Quang Dat hopes that everyone will understand and have a more sympathetic view of the flight crew.

In a “letter from the heart” titled “Be fair, guys, we’ve tried our best,” Vietnam’s youngest pilot Quang Dat begins by answering the question “Why are flights often delayed?”.

Having flown to many major airports in Asia such as Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore... Quang Dat still feels "really stressed" about flights to Ho Chi Minh City.

“Once you land, sometimes waiting for the taxiway and parking lot to get in can take 10 to 15 minutes. So in total, if a flight is unlucky, just because of traffic congestion, it can be delayed by 30 to 45 minutes. A plane serves about 6 to 8 flights a day, if just half of them are stuck in traffic, the last flights of the day can be delayed by 2 hours.”

Accordingly, he analyzed that the waiting time between flights is quite close. Only then can people buy the cheapest airline tickets in the world.

As for why there is no time gap between flights, the captain continued to explain: “To be cheap, an aircraft must make as many flights as possible each day. Pilots and flight attendants do not even get a minute of rest after landing.”

Nguyen Quang Dat, born in 1991, is a captain of Jetstar Pacific airline.

Just a few hours after it was first posted, the 9x captain's letter attracted a lot of attention from the online community, reaching nearly 2,000 shares with more than 400 comments. Besides the opinions supporting Quang Dat's actions, there were also many people who thought that these were just "excuses".

“Dat completely respects and accepts everyone’s disagreements. Because I wrote this to express my feelings and get closer to the passengers, not to cause controversy,” he affirmed.

According to him, the work of pilots and flight attendants is not simply to do a good job of preparing the aircraft, refueling and checking the systems or smiling and greeting passengers. Before each flight, everyone has exactly 30 minutes to clean up and pick up all the trash that passengers leave on the plane.

However, not all passengers understand the profession. Quang Dat confided that what made him feel the saddest was that after landing, he represented the crew to explain very specifically, but everyone still shook their heads and asked the flight attendant: "Why didn't you let the Western captain fly but let the Vietnamese pilot fly and not land?"

Quang Dat said that not only himself but all his colleagues always put the safety of passengers on each flight as the most important goal. Once, 10 minutes after takeoff, the system reported an error, Quang Dat immediately turned back to the airport to check even though he knew the error was very small and could be ignored to continue flying. "But anything can happen, I cannot be subjective with everyone's lives," he confided.

However, Quang Dat also frankly stated his opinion that if the situation of flights being continuously delayed continues, it will be a really big problem.

“All airlines want to focus on quality when providing services, but our infrastructure has not met such high requirements. In fact, the on-time rate of flights in Vietnam is 80%, which is very high compared to the world. We will try our best and hope that everyone can understand and sympathize more after this article,” Dat said.

According to Thanh Nien